In Britain and beyond, the summer of 2026 has been marked by record temperatures, deadly wildfires and drought, the inevitable consequences of climate change driven by the burning of fossil fuels.
The UK Met Office reported that “daytime maximum temperatures across England and Wales are now roughly 3-4°C hotter than they would have been without human-induced climate change”, adding that “more than 2,700 people are thought to have died from heat-related causes during the May and June heatwaves in England and Wales”.Those figures will have been added to further by the ongoing high temperatures in July and August.
Not surprisingly, the latest IPSOS survey taken in the UK at the start of August found that three quarters of those polled expressed concern about climate change “with the majority of the population reporting personal daily disruption and anticipating recurring extreme weather events”.
Economists are warning of the effect on crop yields across Europe, adding further impetus to rising global food prices. More widely, continual global warming is a growing factor in the forced migration of millions of the world’s poor away from regions where their lives have become unsustainable.
Against this background, alongside the dwindling of North Sea oil and gas reserves, it has dawned on wide sections of the British capitalist class that a change of energy and climate policy is needed. In 2019, the then Conservative prime minister Theresa May first committed the UK to achieving a ‘net zero’ contribution to climate change by 2050. However, five prime ministers later, only limited steps have been taken to achieve this aim, despite even this target being insufficiently urgent given the scale of the global climate crisis.
In this context, the comments made by the leaders of two of Britain’s biggest trade unions, the GMB and Unite, back in June, could seem at odds with growing public concerns about climate change. They both spoke out against the possible appointment of Ed Miliband as chancellor in the new Andy Burnham government, suggesting he was too entrenched in his support for ‘net-zero’.
Gary Smith, GMB general secretary, took particular aim at how Miliband, as Energy Secretary in the Starmer government, had imposed at least a temporary ban on new drilling licences for gas and oil under the North Sea. Smith blamed Labour’s energy policy as being one of the reasons why some of his members were voting for Reform, claiming that “sacking thousands of workers who currently work in the North Sea is economic madness. It’s more akin to Thatcher and what she did to Middlesbrough in the 1980s”.
Sharon Graham, newly re-elected general secretary of Unite, told the Observer newspaper that Miliband “would be a noose around the neck of what we need to do on jobs”, adding that “if you’ve got somebody in there close to the decision-making where they’re not pro-worker in their gut, then that’s a problem for a party that’s supposed to be the party of workers. A lot of the left has now become a middle-class project. It now needs to work for the working class”.
In making those comments, both union leaders risk aligning themselves with the pro-fossil fuel sections of big business, including Tony Blair, who have been lobbying for the Burnham government to lift the North Sea drilling moratorium. Their argument, that a drilling ban just means relying on more expensive gas and oil imports instead, is being heavily promoted in sections of the media.
But, as well as just further delaying the urgent action needed on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, in a world market where prices are set globally, allowing the fossil fuel giants to keep drilling under the North Sea will do nothing to bring down workers’ energy bills (see Socialism Today No.299, July-August 2026).
It would temporarily retain some limited employment in the North Sea industries, but these jobs will inevitably continue to decline since the main gas and oil reserves have long since been exhausted. However, millions of well-paid, secure and vitally necessary jobs could be created by mass investment in green energy, transport, insulation and associated manufacturing sectors. That is the investment that trade union leaders should be calling for, and mobilising their members to demand.
It is also wrong to give any credence to the idea that taking action on global warming is somehow being ‘middle-class’ or ‘anti-worker’. It is the working class and poor who will continue to suffer worst from the dire effects of climate crisis. The costs of food inflation will soon be hitting the pockets of union members, to follow the months of summer heat.
It is true that too many environmental campaigners look to individual consumption as being the cause of the crisis. Such an approach puts the blame on working-class consumers who are simply struggling to get themselves to work in their polluting second-hand cars or to heat their poorly insulated homes, despite rising fuel bills.
Instead, the key to action on climate change is winning a change in who owns and controls production. It requires an end to private capitalist ownership governed by short-term profit and the limits of individual nation states, and its replacement by public ownership under democratic workers’ control that would allow a socialist planned global economy where investment could be directed to the millions of ‘climate jobs’ that are so urgently needed.
Trade unionists and socialists shouldn’t be seen to be supporting any of the competing wings of the capitalist class, neither the pro-‘Big Oil’ right populists playing on workers’ fears – like Trump and Farage – nor the supposedly ‘green’ capitalists represented by politicians such as Miliband.
After all, Miliband may have overseen an increase in contracts being issued for renewable energy projects, but only after the Starmer government had halved its initial ‘green investment’ plans. This included slashing plans for a major home insulation scheme which could have directly benefited many working-class families, and the workers implementing the scheme.
Ailing British capitalism, and crisis-ridden world capitalism as a whole, will never be able to provide the planned investment required to repair the catastrophic climate damage that its anarchic production has produced.
In that sense, Sharon Graham was right to criticise Miliband for wanting “to let go of one rope before we get hold of another… Ed only seems to be interested in one part of the equation, which is to reach the target, but doesn’t seem to be interested at all, in any way shape or form, in the jobs that will replace those that go”.
But it would be a mistake to raise any expectations that somehow Burnham will be different and that there is any prospect of a Burnham government being any more ‘pro-worker’ than Starmer’s was. As another pro-capitalist politician, Burnham will end up attacking jobs, pay and conditions at the behest of British big business.
The only way to promote both vital needs – protecting working-class living standards at the same time as protecting the environment – is for trade union leaders to break with all of the pro-capitalist politicians and help ensure that the working class has its own political voice, and can elect workers’ representatives who will demand the socialist plan of production that our future depends upon.
Martin Powell-Davies